[Evergreen-governance-l] Simon Phipps article on assessing governance of open source projects

[Dan Scott]

I found this article by Simon Phipps (formerly responsible for Sun
Microsystem's open source efforts, now a member of the board of
directors for the Open Source Initiative) interesting to consider in
light of our ongoing efforts to establish a governance model for
Evergreen:

http://webmink.com/essays/open-by-rule/

In the article, Simon has tried to distill his experience with various
open source projects into a rough governance benchmark based on the most
effective communities (again, in his experience). His thoughts about
establishing an "Open Meritocratic Oligarchy" could be timely in light
of our recent discussions about who should serve on the bootstrap
oversight board, and in what capacity. His assessment goes beyond mere
governance models and also includes results (such as "does the project
have contributors from more than one company", etc). It's a quick, light
set of criteria without the overhead (and somewhat arbitrary) criteria
associated with the Business Readiness Rating that I tried applying to
the Evergreen project years ago, and the focus on governance was
refreshing.

Simon published an example of applying this benchmark at
http://webmink.com/2011/02/11/is-libreoffice-open-by-rule/ and it might
be an interesting exercise to try applying these criteria to Evergreen.
Simon's opinions are just that - opinions - and there might be good
reasons for deviating from what he thinks are best practices, but we
should probably make that rationale explicit if we do decide to go down
a different path.